Final Fantasy 4

J2E

v3.21 ? - July 3rd, 2001

Description

Translation History

The FF4j translation was much more than just any ordinary translation. What started off as several different independent translation projects in competition with each other has become one of the biggest translation projects/groups on the net!

Through working together J2e Translations has achieved great goals that have, and will continue to revolutionize the translation scene! For a little history, most of the small FF4 translations started around August of 1997. These included several groups known as the Silicon Travelers, HELLSTORM TRANSLATIONS, and more! All of these groups had mainly decided to translate the japanese version of FF4 mostly to gain ROM-HACKING experience due to the lack of translators in the scene at the time. These groups had been using the american version of Final Fantasy 4, known as Final Fantasy 2 here, as a base and reference to their FF4 translations. Anyways, at the time the 3 biggest FF4 translation groups were HELLSTORM TRANSLATIONS, a solo translation carried out by Anus P., Blasted2/Necrosaro translation group, who else coulda been in it??, and the Silicon travelers, headed by P-Funk.

Around the end of November/beginning of December was when big things started to happen. Apparently at the time The Silicon Travelers seemed to have died out, and Anus P. joined up with Blasted2 and Necrosaro to form a completely new translation group known as J2e translations. Also at that time we managed to get other people to do some great things for us. We had contacted Ian Kelly, the man responsible for creating the useful FF4/2us differences document, only to learn that he had been translating FF4 for someone else already. But after talking for a bit, we managed to get some help, and Ian Kelly had decided to translate the scripts for us as soon as we got them all dumped! Also at that time, we had met a guy named Joke, responsible for translating FF4 to Thai. This guy was a great guy. He was able to use FF2us's code for Dual-Tile Encoding and incorporate it into FF4j! What Dual-Tile Encoding enabled us to do was store 2 letters as one byte in the rom, thus letting us have as much text as we needed without needing to expand the rom size! So while Ian Kelly was translating those scripts we decided to take the text from FF2us and paste it into FF4j, thus giving us a temporary patch to release!

A little bit later however, we had learned that The Silicon Travelers was alive and well! Although now the only 2 members of it were P-Funk and Rydia, another useful translator! So we had finally gotten ourselves competition again, especially since P-Funk was learning ASM HACKING at the time! But we had then talked with him and got him to join J2e with us. This meant we now had an ASM HACKER, and another translator! also because of the fact that Dark Force was responsible for teaching P-Funk ASM, we had also managed to get him on our team! It was at that point that we had decided to drop DTE in our translation and use ROM-Expansion to fit all the text in. Although Rom Expansion wasn't needed at the time because of DTE, it had allowed us to use FF4's original Dual-Tile Encoding to print out 2 tile vertically instead of 2 tiles horizontally. What this let us do was bring a new 16x8 font into the game rather than the old 8x8! The person behind this was Anus P.

He had also made it so that the old 8x8 font was still in the game. Shortly after all this, and the main scripts had been translated, J2e had revolutionized translations once again by devising new script insertion methods which a couple of well known groups have adopted from us. The program used to make these insertions was created by Necrosaro. Originally it was designed specifically for FF4, but has recently been released to the public as "Thingy". These script insertion methods allowed us to make changes to the scripts easily, and it was less time-consuming. Once the main scripts were in FF4, however, Dark Force had introduced us to a guy named Trainspotter. He is an expert in japanese translating, and script revising. That's when the FF4j translation became a translation/revision. He had perfected the scripts to sound a lot better and make the overall game play more enjoyable! We released the translation earlier last year, but we have since expanded many windows and lines of text for an even more professional quality translation. In fact this version almost looks like a completely different hack from the last release. Enjoy!

Why Re-Translate?

Why would we re-translate a game already translated here in North America? Simple... Square Soft did a HORRIBLE job translating this game! They used bad english, tons of abbreviations, and censored out many important parts of the story that were in the japanese scripts! Also FF2us was based on FF4j Easytype, which was alot easier than the hardtype version which is what we translated. Also in the Easytype version many things (like items and stuff) were censored out, but with this translation you get everything that was originally meant to be in FF4! including the ever famous Porno Mag! hehehe

*THANKS*
J2e would like to thank the following people for their help:
Joke, J3DI, F.H., Jeff Bolz, ZSKNIGHT, Pan, Thermopyle, J. Man, Toma XIII, Ballz, Sephiroth, The Dumper

Special Notes

Unfortunately due to an error in ZSNES the whole credits are not displayed when completing the game. In order to view the credits, use snes9x or any other emulator.

SAVE GAMES - Do NOT continue from save games earlier than version 3.0! Doing so will result in strange errors when playing the game (such as character having the wrong names and other strange bugs). If you do not have a savegame from one of our more recent releases (version 3.0 and above), then start a new game from the beginning and you should not have any errors when playing the game.

For any people wanting to translate Final Fantasy IV into another language, we strongly recommend you hack the FF4J rom and not the pre-patched FF4e rom. If you insist on using the translated FF4e rom as the basis for your translation, contact us at J2e and maybe we can work out an agreement. If you wish to use the FF4e scripts and not the FF4e rom, you are free to use them, just ask and remember to give credit and thanks for the scripts on your webpage!

Much of what I know about this ROM is already detailed in the YouTube descriptor: ikari sent me this ROM via Twitter. 8M Pack provided by @ZueriHB. Based on the month and format I would presume this is...